Future Competitors to Flash State Their Cases

One of the most talked-about data storage alternatives to flash ROM is phase-change memory, which also appears to be one of the most promising. But there are several others that also bear watching, such as CMOx, a multilevel scRAM chip; spin-transfer torque RAM, or STT RAM; thermally assisted switching magnetic RAM, or TAS-MRAM; and Hewlett-Packard's memristor.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.-NAND and NOR flash
get virtually all of the attention these days when the topic is solid-state
memory and storage, but there are several other developments in this sector
that have piqued the interest of smart folks who look ahead to the future.

One of the most talked-about alternatives is phase-change memory, which also
appears to be one of the most promising. Ed Doller, CTO
of Numonyx and a former Intel flash strategist, laid out the value proposition
and product
road map for Numonyx's production of PCM chips on Aug. 11 in a keynote here
at the fourth annual Flash Memory Summit at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

But there are several others that also bear watching, such as CMOx, a multilevel
scRAM (storage-class RAM) chip; STT
RAM (spin-transfer torque RAM);
TAS-MRAM (thermally assisted switching magnetic RAM);
and Hewlett-Packard's memristor.

Companies that are investing in this R&D are licking their chops at the
prospect of replacing NAND flash, the reigning standard nonvolatile form of
storage used in solid-state drives, iPods, cell phones, thumb drives, servers,
storage arrays and other hardware.

While NAND and NOR flash have a long list of
positive features, most analysts and industry veterans believe that the
high-intensity/high-transaction Web-based applications that are coming into
more common use may need an entirely new grade of SSD
in the next few years to produce optimum results on a 24/7 basis.

Here's a list of some of the competitors and brief descriptions of the
attributes of their products. eWEEK will follow up with more detailed analysis
on the progress of these technologies soon.

CMOx-Startup Unity Semiconductor
is pushing CMOx, a multilayer flash chip that promises four times the density
and five to 10 times the write speed of today's high-end NAND flash.

Darrell Rinerson, co-founder and CEO of
Unity, said the company has developed a 64GB CMOx (metal oxide) chip and
describes it as a "passive rewritable cross-point memory array" with
no transistors in the memory cell. CMOx is next-generation nonvolatile memory
based on a proprietary switching effect that occurs in certain metal-oxide
combinations. The 64GB chips are scheduled for pilot production in late 2010,
with volume production set for 2011.

TAS-MRAM-This is being
developed by startup Crocus Technology. As one of the most promising "spintronics"
applications, MRAM combines the advantages of high writing and reading speed,
limitless endurance and nonvolatility. The integration of MRAM in FPGA (field-programmable
gate array) allows the logic circuit to rapidly configure the algorithm, the
routing and logic functions, and easily realize the dynamical reconfiguration
and multicontext configuration. It is nonvolatile, faster than SRAM
(static RAM), potentially cheap, and features
low power consumption and a high integration level.

Field-Induced
MRAM (Toggle MRAM)-Historically, Field-Induced MRAM is hard to scale
and has stability and retention problems. But Crocus, which is also working on
this, aims to solve these problems using a thermally activated magnetic latch
called Thermally Assisted Switching. This allows each flash cell to retain
memory value. It also apparently scales well.

STT-RAM-Grandis, another chip
startup, is championing this one. Grandis claims its proprietary Spin-Transfer
Torque RAM technology has all the characteristics of an ideal "universal
memory" and represents a breakthrough over first-generation,
field-switched MRAM technology. Also known as SpinRAM, STT-RAM's synthesis of
nonvolatility, fast read and write speed, unlimited endurance, and
extendibility beyond the 45-nanometer semiconductor node provides significant
advantages over conventional memory technologies and allows system designers to
develop new products with high performance, low power consumption and low cost,
according to Grandis.

HP's
Memristor-HP Senior Fellow and Director of Quantum Science Research
Stan Williams, speaking at the conference, described the technology this way:
"This is sort of the missing element of the processor puzzle. It takes its
place alongside the resistor, capacitor and inductor in the chip. An ideal
memristor is a passive two-terminal electronic device that is built to express
only the property of memristance (just as a resistor expresses resistance and
an inductor expresses inductance)." In summary, let's just say a memristor
makes an SSD act as if it's on steroids.

Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz